A Volcano of Our Own Making

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A Volcano of Our Own Making explores the biography, writings, and activism of Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (1880–1957), a prominent figure in the history of modern Jewish thought and in the movements for binationalism in Palestine. Known to his readers as Rabbi Binyamin, he demanded the return of Palestinian refugees and the abolition of Israeli military rule following the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. Avi-ram Tzoreff uses R. Binyamin’s writings as a lens for a comprehensive critical understanding of the Zionist settler-colonial project and sheds light on patterns of resistance from the perspective of an oppositionist within the Zionist movement itself. More than an intellectual biography, this book examines larger questions about pre–World War I multinational empires, global anticolonial movements, and the intersections between religion, secularism, and nationalism.

Avi-ram Tzoreff is a historian focusing on the history of Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, and the political and cultural history of Jews in Ottoman Iraq and Habsburg Galicia.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. The Multinational Periphery: Galicia as the Bedrock of Binationalism
2. Hameʿorer’s Minority Report: Challenging Modern Hebrew Literature’s Secular Image
3. “An Imagined Desert That, in Reality, Is the Core of the Yishuv”: The Emergence of Zionist Settler-Colonial Policies
4. “Natural Workers”? The Yishuv from the Standpoint of Its Yemenite Victims
5. “Not Withdrawing into the Boundaries of the Land of the Gazelle”: Binationalism and the Critique of Zionist-Colonial Affiliation
6. “Saving ‘My Sick People’”: Criticism of the “Negation of Exile” and Zionist Policies During World War II
7. Resisting Zionist “Deir Yassinism”: Palestinian Nakba and Binationalism in the Israeli Settler-State
Epilogue: On the Possibility of Counter-History

Notes
Bibliography
Index